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Ted By Michael Mullen © Michael Mullen 2009
I
slid my nimble pink fingertips down Ted’s back, grazing and encircling grayish-brown
mounds of skin. I was tender. I
was afraid it hurt when I touched them, but was too embarrassed to ask
him.
Between the lesions his skin was a ghostly white, and his backbone
nearly pierced
his thin skin like fingers reaching through a bed sheet.
“That feels nice,” he said. His
voice was a wheezy growl like the purr of an asthmatic cat. Ted
swallowed the
phlegm in his throat, and smacked his dried lips. I looked at the back
of his
head, at the tufts of blond hair, thin and delicate. I felt if I ran my
fingers
through his hair it would give way and disappear like snow on a warm
palm.
He turned his head and shoulders
toward me. I pulled the comforter up to my collar bone, shy. My
reluctance made
him smile, and lean forward to kiss me with chapped lips. He closed his
eyes,
but mine stayed open, observing him. His eyelids looked like white tea
leaves. His
cheeks were peppered with pock marks, the skin dipping into sunken
pools, gaunt
and aged. Nose hairs peaked out.
The motel room was humid, our skin
clammy. The white drapes across the window illuminated every few
moments from the
VACANT neon sign signaling at traffic like a streetwalker. As I lay
back onto
the stiff pillow, I turned my head to my right and looked at a stain on
the
wall. It was a long black scuff mark, as if from the bottom of a boot,
inexplicably high on the wall near the ceiling. I imagined a man
walking
horizontal across the wall, disrespectful of the cheap wallpaper, and
smiled to
myself.
“What?” Ted asked.
I looked up at him. His loose skin
fell towards me from his face like a bulldog inspecting an ant. I
gingerly
touched his neck, which felt cold.
“Are you ready?” I asked for an
infinite time, to Ted, to
Ted was a corpse with a pulse,
lowering into me like he’d soon be lowered into the ground. I felt the
initial
pressure, a feeling I thought I would overcome eventually. Given the
right
amount of time, any feeling can be numbed, ignored.
The clock showed 10:34 on the
nightstand next to a Bible and a pill bottle. No condom
wrapper, however,
I noted.
As he thrust into me, releasing
groans that felt like hollers to heaven, I kept a steady breath like a
woman
giving birth. I let my hands slide down his back, reading sores like
human
Braille, and wondered which one had appeared first. And
wondered when one would appear on me.
I arched my back, moaning
theatrically, before lying flat again. Ted buried his face over my
right
shoulder, his sighs and whimpers muffled by the tendons in my neck. I
grasped
his ass with my fingers. It was flaccid, a victim to gravity like his
face. I
stared straight up at the stucco ceiling.
The clock showed 10:36.
On the freeway adjacent to the
motel, cars swerved and merged and honked, fathers returning late from
work, sons
heading to the city for entertainment or, at least, distraction. A honk
pierced
the night, effective only in reminding the motel that the freeway was
nearby.
Through the wall, in the next room, a man hollered at his wife in
Spanish.
At 10:38 Ted’s body tensed between
my legs, and he finished, wheezing into the pillow. He slid off the bed
with
much effort and walked naked into the bathroom. As he urinated, the
spill of it
echoing, I lay there with the stink of Ted on my body. I peered down at
my
prick, which lay limp and unmoving.
By 10:57 we were checked out of the
motel.
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